How neoconservatives and their military-industrial complex allies keep America losing
Erik Prince | Asia Times | May 3, 2024
It is painfully apparent to anyone of sound mind and judgment that there’s something gravely wrong with America’s current military capacity and our ability to project power in the world.
The WWII-era fighting force composed of 14 million GIs with a muscular industrial base backing them up is almost unimaginable today. In the last three years, five different US embassies have been hastily evacuated: Sudan, Afghanistan, Belarus, Ukraine, and Niger.
Americans are held hostage in Gaza; commercial shipping traffic is blockaded and our ground and naval forces are shot at daily with impunity. How did America go from winning the Cold War and becoming the sole global superpower in the 90s to the state of disarray that we find ourselves in now?
One reason is financial. All warfare has an underlying economic basis and a nation’s military power reflects its economic structure. Today in America the “exorbitant privilege” of the US dollar and the unlimited printing press of fiat currency it enables means current US defense spending is essentially covered by debt: indeed at least 30% of the current national debt consists of military overspend from the so-called Global War on Terror.
This reality has created an absence of strategic discipline and a military policy that prioritizes a tiny guild of contractors feeding an obese top-heavy structure rather than winning wars.
The roots of the current situation reach back to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Reagan started a pivot from 35 years of containment to a more aggressive approach, covered by deficits. Channeled economically, politically, culturally, socially, and through covert action these measures helped to bring an end to the Soviet Union, but at a critical strategic cost.
Partly as a consequence of the central economic role that the USSR had come to play for the US defense industry, the opportunity to positively engage with Russia after 1991 was rejected by the dominant neoconservative faction and their military-industrial complex allies in Washington.
Originally Trotskyites, the Neocons had taken root in the corporatist wing of the Republican Party and gradually increased in influence, to eventually become dominant in the Washington Beltway foreign policy and emblematic of its mentality of continuous warfare funded by an unlimited fiat printing press.
The so-called “peace dividend” that followed the end of the Cold War was redirected into expanding NATO instead of ending it. The goal was to enrich the military-industrial complex by creating more clients to buy US weapons, at the expense of the opportunity to partner with Russia. Promises of not expanding NATO eastward into former Warsaw Pact countries were broken and NATO troops were deployed on Russia’s border.
The priorities of Neocon Washington were also projected into US policy in Africa. After Liberian warlord Charles Taylor sponsored the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone in the late ’90s, the RUF quickly captured most of the country, particularly the diamond-rich areas of the north.
In the process, they committed atrocious acts of savagery against Sierra Leone’s civilian population. Into this maelstrom entered Executive Outcomes (EO), a South African private military contractor (PMC). EO initially deployed 60 ex-South African Special Forces personnel fresh from ending a civil war that had raged for years in Angola and eventually expanded to around 200 well-trained personnel.
Using mostly equipment abandoned by Sierra Leone’s disintegrated army, within six months they had retaken the country and restored peace and order to the extent that free and fair elections could be held three months later.
Executive Outcomes was sponsored by an association of diamond miners who wanted their mines back. This group was willing to sponsor an ongoing 30-man EO presence to retrain a new Sierra Leone armed forces while providing a backstop in case the rebels returned.
Susan Rice, then Bill Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, vetoed this proposal: “We don’t want any white mercenaries in Africa,” she declared. The result? Within months the RUF and a new group called the West Side Boys had returned, killing, looting and pillaging the country.
11,000 UN Peacekeepers at a cost of US$1 billion-plus per year in 1990s US dollars were now deployed. But they didn’t solve the problem and not until the British SAS killed hundreds of rebels during a large hostage rescue mission of Irish Peacekeepers did the country start to stabilize.
This debacle in West Africa occurred on the heels of an even greater catastrophe further East. In the spring of 1994, after decades of simmering ethnic hatred in Rwanda, the Hutus launched a program of manual genocide. Over a four-month period they killed almost 1,000,000 of their Tutsi neighbors, a murder rate exceeding 8,000 per day, mainly using machetes and farm tools.
Here as well EO made a formal proposal to the UN and the US government to intervene and prevent further slaughter. The proposal was also rejected by Rice in Washington. EO stayed out and the carnage continued unabated until Paul Kagame’s exiled Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded from Uganda and retook the country.
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By the late 90s, with Washington engaged in combat in the former Yugoslavia, a new kind of enemy was emerging: jihadist Islam.
In 1993 a poorly conceived and badly executed nation-building exercise in Somalia had already supplied a foretaste when the Battle of Mogadishu resulted in the death of 18 US Special Operations personnel and 73 wounded after repeated requests for air support were rejected by an indecisive Clinton administration.
By 1999, unanswered attacks in Nairobi, Dar As Salaam, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and New York had claimed hundreds of lives and mauled a US Destroyer, USS Cole. Finally, on Sept 11, 2001, this series of body blows reached its spectacular culmination.
In the aftermath of 9/11, President Bush met with his War Cabinet to plan a response to the costliest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. As the Pentagon smoldered, the Department of Defense recommended a bombing campaign and a Ranger raid against an Al Qaeda-linked farm but wanted to wait at least six months before beginning combat operations in order to avoid the Afghan winter.
The CIA, for its part, recommended an Unconventional Warfare campaign. They wanted to supercharge the Northern Alliance, who’d been fighting the Taliban for a decade, with US airpower directed by SOF advisors. The CIA plan was adopted. The Taliban and their guests Al-Qaeda were routed in weeks by a highly aggressive SOF targeting cycle which gave them no quarter.
The US response to 9/11 should have resembled a Scipio Africanus-style Roman punitive raid, killing all Taliban and Al-Qaeda remnants within reach, including those sheltering in the tribal areas of Pakistan, and then withdrawing. Instead, the Neocons saw a lucrative opportunity to “nation build.”
Because the Pentagon runs on the bureaucratic principle of budget cycles and the internal war for promotion rather than the principle of victory, a vastly inflated occupational army ultimately comprising 120,000 soldiers was deployed to the country. This force represented a repetition of the failed Soviet plan of the 80s, to the extent of occupying the same bases.
Ignoring every historical lesson of successful counter-insurgencies, experienced soldiers were rotated on 6-12 month intervals with fresh units, losing all continuity and local intelligence. The top commander spot rotated 18 times in 20 years.
Concerned as per usual with marketing for their defense contractor clients, the Neocons dragged dozens of largely unwilling NATO members to Afghanistan, producing a dysfunctional chaos of individual national mandates. Many nations wouldn’t patrol at night or engage in offensive combat missions. When the German army arrived in Kabul in the spring of 2002, among their concerns was finding appropriate housing for all the gay couples deployed in the Bundeswehr.
The Neocon plan for Afghanistan, or at least the story, was to impose a centralized Jeffersonian democracy on a largely illiterate, semi-feudal tribal nation by throwing infinite money at a paper-thin civil society. The result, unsurprisingly, was corruption, not infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the military operation remained chaos incarnate. Not only was there never a truly empowered supreme commander, but authorities were split between the US Ambassador, CIA station chief, the current 4-star US General, the CENTCOM Commander and their staff residing in Qatar or Tampa, and various representatives from NATO. This committee from hell produced predictable results.
In the 1980s the US provided lethal aid to the Mujahedeen fighting the Soviets running to $1 billion a year including state-of-the-art Stinger missiles, which knocked down an average of one Soviet aircraft per day. Nobody provided this kind of aid to the Taliban: not one NATO/Coalition aircraft was lost to a guided missile. But air supremacy wasn’t enough.
The author is the founder of Blackwater it says at the end.